Thursday, February 23, 2012

Dozens killed across Iraq

WSJ: "A barrage of explosions and drive-by shootings killed dozens of people and wounded hundreds across Iraq on Thursday, in one of the bloodiest episodes of renewed violence in the wake of the U.S. military withdrawal from the country.

The attacks spanned six provinces, from Nineveh in the north, which borders Syria, to Babylon, south of Baghdad. They targeted security forces, local officials, busy neighborhoods, mosques and vital infrastructure such as telecommunications towers.

The capital, Baghdad, bore the brunt of the early-morning mayhem. Among the fallen were ordinary citizens, including a boy walking to school and office workers eating breakfast at a diner. By nightfall, security officials said at least 70 people had been killed and 374 wounded, with well over half of the casualties in Baghdad."

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' "There was no reason for this bomb. A primary school is here, students came to study and people came to work," Karim Abbas woefully said in the town of Musayyib, where he saw a car bomb parked near an elementary school kill three people and wound 73. Most of the injured in the town, about 40 miles south of Baghdad, were schoolchildren.

Other Iraqis, fed up with the continued violence, furiously blamed security forces for letting it happen.

"We want to know: What were the thousands of policemen and soldiers in Baghdad doing today while the terrorists were roaming the city and spreading violence?" said Ahmed al-Tamimi, who was working at an Education Ministry office a block away from a restaurant bombed in the Shiite neighborhood of Kazimiyah in northern Baghdad.

He described a hellish scene of human flesh and pools of blood at the restaurant, where another car bomb killed nine people and wounded 19.'

Baghdad in 2000: "A woman known as Um Haydar was beheaded reportedly without charge or trial at the end of December 2000. She was 25 years' old and married with three children. Her husband was sought by the security authorities reportedly because of his involvement in Islamist armed activities against the state. He managed to flee the country. Men belonging to Feda'iyye Saddam came to the house in al-Karrada district and found his wife, children and his mother. Um Haydar was taken to the street and two men held her by the arms and a third pulled her head from behind and beheaded her in front of the residents. The beheading was also witnessed by members of the Ba'ath Party in the area. The security men took the body and the head in a plastic bag, and took away the children and the mother-in-law. The body of Um Haydar was later buried in al-Najaf. The fate of the children and the mother-in-law remains unknown."